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A Shameful Story
According to the book 'Lost Lives' (1999) loyalist paramilitaries were responsible for close to 30% of the deaths during the conflict, though that figure would now have to be significantly adjusted upwards, given loyalist killings in the last four years.
The same book states that British Crown forces were responsible for killing 10% of the people who died during the Troubles. It is a statistic which is regularly used by opponents and critics of the republican struggle as simplistic proof that the authorities acted in a controlled, disciplined and lawful manner whereas the IRA, which was responsible for almost half the lives lost, acted outrageously and disproportionately for an unjust cause.
A statistic tells only part of the story and doesn't explain the cause of violence or its ongoing generation. Decades of institutionalised sectarian discrimination and oppression, resulting in nationalist alienation from the state, preceded the re-emergence of the IRA in August 1969. Had not unionist forces murderously attacked nationalist areas in 1969 it is highly unlikely that history would have taken the course it did.
Few people joined the IRA because they were conversant in or converts to republican philosophy: more joined as a reaction to the Falls curfew, internment, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes or a thousand subsequent emotive incidents and provocations.
What Sir John Stevens had to report on collusion between British state forces and loyalist paramilitaries came as no surprise last Thursday. The surprise was that Britain's most senior police officer was admitting Britain's dirty war in Ireland, though he was careful not to implicate those in senior positions within the military and political establishments.
When Sir Arthur Young carried out an inquiry into the fatal assault on 42-year-old Sammy Devenney in Derry by the RUC in 1969 he could not identify those responsible because of 'a conspiracy of silence' among the police.
When John Stalker came here in the 1980s to investigate a number of RUC shoot-to-kill incidents he found himself suspended over false allegations that he associated with Manchester criminals and was removed from the inquiry. He later stated that he was obstructed by RUC Chief Constable, John Hermon.
Among the controversial deaths Stalker was inquiring into were those of three unarmed IRA men, Eugene Toman, Sean Burns and Gervaise McKerr, who were shot dead at a police checkpoint in Lurgan in 1982. Three policemen, who lied about the circumstances of the shooting, were charged with the murder of Eugene Toman but were later acquitted. Giving evidence one said that he had been told by his superiors to lie to the investigating officers and that the Official Secrets Act would cover his actions. The three were acquitted and the judge, Lord Justice Gibson, perversely commended them, "for their courage and determination in bringing the three deceased men to justice, in this case to the final court of justice."
Just before the inquests into the deaths of the three men were to be held in September 1984 the Armagh coroner, Gerry Curran, resigned, saying, "Within the past few days I have been engaged in the review of police files in these cases. Certain grave irregularities are documented and recorded on the file. Consequently, I am not prepared to preside at the inquest in these cases."
Twenty one years later, no inquest into their deaths has ever been held. Solicitor, Pat Finucane, became involved and represented the families in their attempts to have inquests, but, then, in 1989 he was assassinated.
Now, Sir John Stevens in his report has upheld allegations of collusion between the British military and the loyalists who killed Pat Finucane and others.
Many nationalists are sceptical that charges and/or convictions will follow, though Stevens has sent files on over twenty former or active members of the British army and RUC to the Director of Public Prosecution. Most nationalists support the Finucane family's call for an independent judicial inquiry. Even the date of publication is suspect: the day after the British parliament went into recess and people were heading off for their Easter holidays.
The lynchpin in Finucane's assassination was Brian Nelson, a former soldier, whom the British military recruited and sent into the UDA. He is reported to have died two weeks ago. Nelson became the UDA's intelligence officer and liased with his handlers in the Force Reaction Unit who passed on to him thousands of official documents on republican suspects, which were then used to assassinate people - and often the wrong people.
In 1989 the UDA killed Loughlin Maginn at his home in County Down. When his family denied that he was in the IRA the UDA, to prove their case, produced a police photograph of Maginn in RUC custody, taken after he had once been arrested and questioned about republican activity. The outcry from this resulted in Hermon's successor, Hugh Annesley, initiating the first of three inquiries into allegations of collusion, which took fourteen years - instead of one year, in the opinion of Stevens - because, again, Stevens was "wilfully obstructed and misled." A British army unit even burnt down his offices in an arson attack, which he says police never fully investigated.
But as well as acting as an intelligence officer Nelson was also involved with gun-running and importing from South Africa a consignment of weapons, two-thirds of which the British military allowed to be distributed to loyalist paramilitary groups. In the 1990s these weapons were used to kill over two hundred and fifty people, in places like Greysteel, Loughinisland and Sean Graham's bookmakers shop on the Ormeau Road.
A number of these weapons have been seized but none have ever been decommissioned. David Trimble has never made a priority of the disposal of these weapons which are still being used, except as an afterthought or as a tag-on to his strident demand that the IRA must decommission its silenced guns and disband.
Clearly, once we factor in the figures for the collusion upheld by Stevens, the total number of people killed, directly or indirectly, by British forces suddenly soars. And yet not even those figures truly reveal the scale of British responsibility in stoking the conflict.
We know that British Intelligence has fought its war on many fronts. It was secretly involved in bombing the south of Ireland and now, despite promises of transparency, the British Ministry of Defence refuses to fully cooperate with Judge Henry Barron's current inquiry into the Dublin/Monaghan bombings.
British Intelligence infiltrated, influenced and directed loyalist paramilitary organisations over a thirty-year period with a policy aimed at sickening, demoralising and defeating the nationalist community, at thwarting it and its demand for justice and equality.
In 1972 Albert Baker, a former SAS soldier/UDA hit man wrote: "Half the assassinations in the early 70s wouldn't have been committed if there hadn't been RUC backing. Half the people who died in those assassinations, or more, would have been living today if the RUC hadn't supported the assassination teams."
The Stevens report is only the tip of the iceberg - but it is still shocking and scandalous. In the words of a 'Guardian' editorial, the report tells "a shameful story of state-sanctioned murder, collusion and obstruction more commonly associated with South American dictatorships than with western parliamentary democracies."
Yet, watch as the British establishment rescues its assassins and declares that it is time to draw a line in the sand, to move on and forget the past.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison